NASA Built a 170-Foot-Tall Welding Machine

As you do.

A 16mm fisheye lens was used to show a wide angle view of the Vertical Assembly Center at NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans at a ribbon-cutting ceremony Sept 12. The VAC is the largest spacecraft welding tool in the world. It is part of a family of state-of-the-art tools designed to weld the core stage of the Space Launch System, the most powerful rocket ever built for mission deep in space. (Photo Credit: NASA)

This towering tool goes by the official name of Vertical Assembly Center (VAC), but that bit of boring bureaucracy speak does a disservice to the badass machine your looking at. It's really a 170-foot-tall, 78-foot-wide mega-tool NASA built to weld the pieces of its next-gen rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS).

Today NASA cut the ribbon on the VAC, which is based at the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. Soon, the space agency hopes, the machines will be joining pieces of the super-sized SLS, whose core stage will measure 200 feet tall.

That's if the SLS actually gets under way, however. The program has it doubters who say the huge cost and sheer complexity of the heavy-lift system will lead to its failure. It's hard to have too much faith after watching a decade-plus of false starts at NASA. Remember President Bush's ambitious Constellation program, which would have sent humans back to the moon and to Mars—it was chronically underfunded and finally cancelled by the Obama Administration, which replaced it with SLS.

No one knows what nonsense Congress will foist upon us next, and so NASA is proceeding with its big next rocket and the incredible tools needed to make it. I hope they got some nice welding masks for the guys running that thing.

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